Vertex AI Agent Builder overview

Vertex AI Agent Builder is a suite of features for building and deploying AI agents. It consists of the following components:

• Agent Garden is a library in the Google Cloud console where you can find and explore sample agents and tools that are designed to accelerate your development. In the Agent Garden, you can find the following:

  • Agents: These are pre-built, end-to-end solutions for specific use cases. For example, you might find an agent designed for customer service, data analysis, or creative writing. These agents are ready to be used and can be customized to fit your needs. Currently, only Google can publish agents to the Agent Garden. To use an agent from the garden, you can select it and deploy it to your project.
  • Tools: These are individual components that you can add to your own agents. Tools provide specific functionalities, like interacting with a database, calling an external API, or performing a search. You can browse the available tools in the Agent Garden and integrate them into your agents built with the Agent Development Kit (ADK). This allows you to extend your agent's capabilities without having to build these functionalities from scratch.

  Go to Agent Garden

• Agent Development Kit (ADK) is an open-source framework that simplifies the process of building sophisticated multi-agent systems while maintaining precise control over agent behavior.

• Vertex AI Agent Engine is a set of services that enables developers to deploy, manage, and scale AI agents in production. Vertex AI Agent Engine offers services such as a fully-managed runtime, evaluation, Sessions, and Memory Bank.

• Agent Tools are tools that you can equip your ADK agent to use, including:

  • Built-in tools such as Grounding with Google Search, Vertex AI Search, and Code Execution

  • RAG Engine for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

  • Google Cloud tools to connect to:

    • Your APIs managed in Apigee API Hub

    • 100+ enterprise applications through Integration Connectors

    • Custom integrations with Application Integration

  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools

  • Ecosystem tools such as LangChain tools, CrewAI tools, and GenAI Toolbox for Databases

The following diagram shows the components of Vertex AI Agent Builder:

To learn more about AI agents in general, see the following:

• Blog post on multi-agent systems with Vertex AI

• What are AI Agents?

• Vertex AI Agent Builder

Workflow for building and deploying agents

1. Discover agent samples and tools specific to your use cases in the Agent Garden.

2. Build and test your agent using the Agent Development Kit.

3. Deploy your agent to Vertex AI Agent Engine.

What's next

• Agent Development Kit Quickstart